Tyler Perry Wouldn't Have Done Gone Girl If He'd Known How Popular It Was

Tyler Perry says he didn't know who director David Fincher was before Gone Girl, and wouldn't have done the movie if he'd known how big it wasCredit: Lloyd Bishop/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

Tyler Perry's social network apparently didn't include David Fincher prior to Gone Girl. During an interview about the movie with Vulture, the Madea writer-director-actor said he never would have signed on to the project if he'd known how popular the book was or been familiar with Fincher's career, which includes blockbuster films like The Social Network and Fight Club.

"I had no sense of that," he said of all the anticipation around the movie adaptation of Gillian Flynn's best-selling crime thriller, in which he stars as attorney Tanner Bolt opposite Ben Affleck. "If I had, I probably would have walked away from it."

He elaborated: "This is the honest-to-God's truth. If I had known who David Fincher was, and his body of work...If I had known that the book was so popular, and so many people loved it...Had I known all those things, I would have said no. And my agent knew that! So he didn't tell me any of those things! Not until after I had signed on to do it."

The reason Perry would have shied away, he explained, is to avoid the pressure of people's expectations. "When things are that magical for people and they become very special for people, there's a lot of pressure for it to be what they want it to be," he told Vulture.

That said, the Why Did I Get Married Too? filmmaker is very happy and impressed with the finished product. "I laughed and I was moved, and I just thought the performances were amazing. It's incredible," he raved. "[David's] brilliant...He nailed it."

Admittedly, Perry hasn't read the entire book, but he thinks Fincher's take is a good one. 'I didn't want to take in a lot of the backstory of the characters if it wasn't in the script for the film. I didn't want to have a lot of that in my head," he said. "But I think he nailed it, though."